Memphis, Dallas & Gulf 4-6-0 "Ten-Wheeler" Locomotives in the USA

Class 200 (Locobase 6633)

Data from 1919 MD& G Locomotive Diagram book supplied in May 2005 by Allen Stanley from his extensive Rail Data Exchange.

Locobase suspects that it may never know the weights of the Memphis, Dallas & Gulf locomotives -- a small thing, but frustrating nevertheless.

The USRA was stumped about the year this locomotive was built, but the clues suggest 1880s or even earlier. The turned caps on the two domes, one of which is positioned just ahead of the cab, the low boiler pressure, small heating surface, and general layout point to such a provenance. As Baldwin didn't build any 18" x 22" Ten-wheelers with such small drivers after 1873, Locobase has settled on that as the latest possible date.

The 2 1/2" diameter for the tubes is given in the drawing; Locobase suspects the figure should actually have been 2 1/4", a size Baldwin adopted before other builders.

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Class 204 (Locobase 6636)

Data from 1919 MD & G locomotive diagram book supplied in May 2005 by Allen Stanley from his extensive Rail Data Exchange. See [], for the ICC's summaries of the 100 or so tap lines involved in a rate case.

Unlike the railroad's 203 (Locobase 6635), a large locomotive for its time, this engine was one of the smallest Ten-Wheelers of a slightly earlier day.

In 1918, the United States Railroad Administration created summaries of locomotive holdings in railroads large and small. One small and relatively short-lived USRA subject was the line that began as the Memphis, Paris and Gulf in 1906 with the initial goal of linking Ashdown and Nashville in southwest Arkansas' Sevier County. That 25 miles was completed, but all the rest of the grandly scaled venture remained unbuilt.

According to the ICC's Tap Line Case summary, before 1910, when it was renamed the Memphis, Dallas, & Gulf the M, P & G "...consisted of about 41 miles of track extending in a northwesterly direction from Ashdown, Ark., through Nashville and Tokio to Murfreesboro. It connected with the Kansas City Southern and Frisco at Ashdown, with the Iron Mountain at Nashville, and at Tokio with the Prescott & Northwestern, another tap line which is a party to this record."

This was a 20th-Century railroad built by the Nashville Lumber Company, built in two sections with the Ashdown to Nashville section begun early in 1906 and the Nashville to Murfreesboro (15 miles) laid down in 1908. According to the ICC, "The timber holdings of [the Nashville] company west of Nashville were quite extensive, and it had many miles of logging tracks connecting with the incorporated road at various points"

The MP&G was renamed the MD&G in 1910 when it acquired the Antoine Valley Railroad and the Ultima Thule, Arkadelphia & Mississippi Railway.

Still later (after World War I), the failing road was reorganized as the more realistically focused Graysonia, Nashville and Ashdown. Some traffic in lumber and fruit products rode the line from Little River County, but by 1927, its best use turned out to be as the Ideal Cement Company's private line.